Monthly Archives: August 2010

With the release of Rygel 0.7.3 I thought I should bring up some sort of FAQ for Rygel and especially the MediaExport plugin, since it has some features and behavior changes that might lead to confusion for long-time (and new) users:

Plugin concurrency

With the release of 0.7.4 you cannot enable both tracker and MediaExport plugins at once. If you do so, the MediaExport plugin will be shut down in favor of the tracker plugin.

Meta-data extraction

Speed

Since 0.7.3 Rygel now uses the gunp-dlna package for meta-data extraction. This is based on the gst-discoverer work by Arun and Edward from Collabora Multimedia. It is significantly faster on video files than the old home-grown meta-data extraction stuff.

Filters

Rygel no longer blindly tries to extract meta-data from everything it sees in the directories. Instead it uses a positive list of file extensions to include. In the default configuration these are:

Folder hierarchy

Since Rygel 0.5.2 there has been support for user-defined virtual folders in the MediaExport plugin. It allowed the user to browse through his media by artist and album e.g. With Rygel 0.7.3 the possibility to define those folders yourself is gone. The configuration syntax wasn’t really intuitive and easy to get wrong. We defined a set of build-in folders which resemble the folders provided by the Tracker plugin.

And since the addition of this default folders made the view of the root folder even more cluttered, I decided to move all every non-virtual folder that directly corresponds to a file-system folder into its own subfolder. In an upcoming release a configuration option to disable the display of this folder will be added.

Instead of making the player crash, gphoto2/libmtp and usb mass storage fight for the right to access the device which leads to very ugly errors in dmesg that look like the device or at least its file-system is severely broken 🙁

So, once again: Either make the device MTP only or remove the device’s entry from the libmtp udev rules which now reside in /lib/udev/rules.d/45-libmtp8.rules